B&T AG

B&T AG opened in Thun in May 1991 as Brugger & Thomet, a two-man outfit importing and adapting weapon accessories for Swiss police units. The name shortened to B&T in 2011, and Karl Brugger has been sole owner since 2005. Around seventy people work there, which makes the company small by the standards of the armies it supplies. Two things pushed it out of the domestic niche. The first was sound suppressors, still a core line covering handguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, precision rifles, machine guns and hunting rifles, along with the adapters and muzzle devices that mount them. The second was a decision to build complete weapons rather than parts for other people's.

The weapon catalogue is organised around a handful of families. The APC series is the flagship, a blowback and gas-operated line spanning pistol calibre models in 9mm, 10mm, .40 and .45, the APC223 and APC556 in 5.56mm, and the APC308 in 7.62mm. Compactness is the selling point. The APC9K measures under fifteen inches with the stock folded, and in March 2019 the US Army picked it in the Sub Compact Weapon competition, a production other transaction agreement worth 2.6 million dollars covering an initial 350 weapons with options to a thousand. Fielding to units ran through 2022, the first new submachine gun the service had bought in more than fifty years. The US Air Force followed with its own APC9K PRO purchase. Below the APC sit the GHM9 and SPC9 blowback carbines and the KH9, aimed at police and civilian buyers, while the older MP9 and TP9 machine pistols trace back to the Steyr TMP design B&T bought and reworked.

Rifles and launchers cover the rest. The APR family, APR308 and APR338, are bolt-action precision rifles for police marksmen and military sniper teams. The SPR300 is an integrally suppressed bolt-action built around .300 Whisper subsonic ammunition for work where muzzle report matters more than range. The GL06 is a single-shot 40mm launcher for less-lethal and signalling munitions, adopted widely by European police forces, and the Station SIX line covers suppressed pistol and training configurations. Accessories remain a real business in their own right, with mounts, handguards, grips, stocks and stock kits sold separately and fitted across other manufacturers' weapons.

Alongside manufacturing, B&T runs a trading arm that represents other makers inside Switzerland, historically including Heckler & Koch and Aimpoint, for domestic police and military customers. Distribution abroad goes through B&T USA in Tampa, Florida, and B&T Deutschland in Cadolzburg, Bavaria, with a webshop and a flagship store handling private buyers and a separate business to business channel for law enforcement and military procurement. The pattern across all of it is a supplier that takes small production runs seriously, which is how a firm of seventy people in the Bernese Oberland ends up on a US Army contract.